We must realize the extent to which it is necessary that our knowledge of language be based on history. Only history can impart to words that degree … - Michel Bréal

My intention was to give a general outline, to sketch a general division and, as it were, a provisional plan of a domain that has not been studied so far and which should be the result of work for many generations of linguists. The reader is therefore requested to consider this book a simple introduction to the science which I propose to call semantics.

We define law, using the word in the philosophic sense, as the constant relation discoverable in a series of phenomena.

Sometimes is a synonym which extends itself, and contrasts by just much the domain of its colleague. At other times it is an historical event which comes to modify and renew the vocabulary.